June 27-29
Hi All,
We arrived in Malay Bay about 12:30pm on Tuesday, June 28 safe and sound. It was a 235nm, 29.5hr, overnight run. For the first 23 hours we had rather nice conditions…..12-16kt ESE, 2-4′ seas, all behind us…..a very nice ride. But, the last 6 hours it got gnarly……20-25G32 kt winds and seas built incredibly to 5-8′ with the occasional 10’r….with a very, very short period……less than the length of Mystic……whoa. A big wave would hit the stern while the previous wave was exiting the bow……an e-ticket ride for sure!!!! We’ve experienced bigger waves but nothing like that short of a period!!
And, to get into Malay Bay we had to turn beam to and then directly into the 30 kt winds. We slowed down but still got salt spray all over us….yikes!!!
Malay Bay is somewhat lacking on the cute scale…..much bigger than expected….maybe 4-5 miles deep and 2-3 miles wide……we had to go pretty far in to get some protection, but even as we anchored the winds were 20-25kts. The Bay is pretty shallow so we could only anchor maybe 0.5 miles from shore so we had a good 1′ chop at anchor….but Mystic does well in that so no motion on the boat!!
The water is very much stirred up so has that dirty green look. The surrounding land is pretty flat with some brown beaches, some trees and some very red rock soil. This is Aboriginal land and someone must have been setting fire to the forests as part of the wild fire control, and smoke soon filled the bay…..with the wind it must have been higher than us as we did not smell it too bad. The sunset was priceless….a super orange glow you could watch for the last 10 minutes!!!
The winds did slack off late yesterday afternoon….down to 10 kts and stayed that way overnight. The air temp even dropped to 77 deg F with humidity around 65%……sweet as…….a very good night sleep. But, the winds picked back up this am so now blowing 23kts in the anchorage….whaaaaa!!!
We did clean the watermaker with the acid solution. We could not run the unit much today due to the dirty water to really give it a good test so when we move tomorrow we will run it for 3-4 hours and hopefully it will run just fine…..finger crossed!!!!
We have been on the go al lot since we left Lizard Island last Tuesday….over a week ago….2, 2-nighters and 1, 1-nighter with 2 nights at anchor in between…..so, yep a bit on the tired side…..covered ~825nm. We now have traveled 2525nm and have ~200nm to go to get to Darwin……all in about 2 months!!!!
We did take the dinghy out today to explore (still manually doing the throttle linkage)…..saw one crocodile…..another 15′ ….big……but, it is too shallow to get close to shore so we didn’t get up close and personal…..the Admiral was quite ok with that. The Bay is bird paradise with lots and lots of different kinds. Again you only get a good view from a distance.
Tomorrow we plan to go 60nm to Port Essington…..we hope it has better wind protection and it’s supposed to be a beautiful Bay…..we shall see!!
Hope all is well!!
John
Mystic Moon
GO MYSTIC GO!!!!